Planning for FY08

With the HST contract signed, we will probably do another staffing plan. Fortunately, we have a running start because of some JWST staffing exercises that Tony Krueger has been leading.

The details are still being worked out, but the main message is that work on the planning systems will start to ramp up significantly the rest of this year and into FY08. If the budget numbers turn out where we expect them to be, we will be hiring several people.

Some of the new hires will come in as junior people, and may be working on HST efforts in order to free up our current staff to work on JWST. Because JWST is a very different observatory, there is a lot of different work, though we will leverage a lot of what we learned from HST.

A big problem looming next year is housing, both for people and for systems. I had a conversation with a JWST lead about the need to find room for JWST development servers. There is room for a few servers, but not for more than a few. Similarly, there is currently room for a few new people, but not for more than a few. We may be looking for space in Bloomberg again, though who would move over is hard to predict.

So, by the end of FY08, we will be very busy:

Serious work on JWST development will be underway

Kepler will be very close to launch

HST SM-4 might actually be in progress.

That last one is hardest to predict, but a three week slip would make October 1st EVA day two. That, I think, would be cool. 🙂